Amazon Prime’s Title Count Exaggerated

By Pradeep Chandrasekaran on 04/13/2012 03:35 PDT

Amazon, claims to be supplying “more than 17,000 movies and television shows” for its customers to enjoy via its Prime Instant Video Streaming service. This number is only true however if a person were to count each and every individual episode from a TV series as an individual title by itself. Amazon told the folks over at FastCompany that the “17,000 titles count is inclusive of both TV episodes and movies.” So while we might construe ‘24’ as one show but Amazon views it as Kiefer Sutherland starring in 192 different shows given the number of episodes that the show currently has.

By following the lines along to that logic the 715 available Power Rangers “titles” account for 4.2% of the ambiguously worded library. Of course technically Amazon is doing nothing wrong here but the phrase “17,000 movies and TV shows” which has now been removed from its website did leave it a little too open for interpretation and whether Amazon knew exactly which interpretation most people were going to end up with or not remains to be seen. Either way, it seems that there are better and more transparent ways to communicate the true extent of what is offered.